The money pours in each month from America, Europe and Japan and overrides anything and everything else. With pre-payments and calls the estimated amount of money provided by the Fed for the world's monetary supply is approximately $100 billion every month. It is not just the American banks that are the recipients of the hand-out but the foreign ones who ship it back to Europe or buy European sovereign debt courtesy of Mr. Bernanke. I suspect that if the American taxpayers were aware of the scheme that the citizens would not be pleased but then what the Fed is doing is not generally part of polite conversation in America and so it is not discussed.

While every European leader, banker, street-sweeper has made a point to use the phrase "Cyprus was not a template" in the last few weeks since D-Boom dropped his tape-bomb, it appears that in reality plans continue to push ahead to indeed 'legalize' these confiscations. As Reuters reports, European Union ministers will consider a proposal this week to impose losses on short-term interbank deposits of lenders. The proposal is part of wider talks to consider when depositors should be bailed-in. Of course, it makes sense that banks should 'not' get special treatment for their overnight lending operations to one another, but the EU leaders want to ensure that these 'sacred' deposits do not escape confiscation, "while it is acknowledged that bailing in interbank liabilities may carry certain risks; on balance, it is preferable... that these liabilities are not excluded from bail-in". Of course, this will worry the ECB as they have worked so hard to unfreeze the interbank lending market post-crisis (with their direct backstops and intermediation). So while there is no template, and Cyprus is unique, it appears the new 'resolution' laws provide a clear plan (not template) for reaching all the way down the capital structure just as they did in Cyprus (and is legally correct from a pari passu basis).

We started off the overnight session with various pseudo-pundits doing the count-up to a 100 in the USDJPY. It was only logical then that moments before the 4 year old threshold was breached, the Yen resumed strengthening following comments from various Japanese politicians who made it appear that the recent weakening in the currency may suffice for now. This culminated moments ago when Koichi Hamada, a former Yale professor and adviser to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, told Reuters that level of 100 yen to dollar is suitable level from the perspective of competitiveness. The result has been a nearly 100 pip move lower in the USDJPY which puts into question the sustainability of the recent equity rally now that the primary carry funding pair has resumed its downward trajectory. Another result is that the rally in the Nikkei225 was finally halted, closing trading unchanged, and bringing cumulative gains since the morning before the BoJ’s announcement last Thursday to 8.9%. Over that the same time period, the TOPIX Real Estate Index is up an incredible 24%, no doubt reflecting the prospect of renewed buying of REIT stocks from the BoJ’s asset purchasing program.

Witches Brew: Part 4 - Reality Bites

The Specter of Things to Come

The road to ruin is on plain display and the playbook is easily seen at this juncture. Let’s take a look at how that playbook will unfold. Contrary to popular outrage of the SOLUTION being IMPOSED it is the correct one once the insured depositors where PROTECTED. In this edition the elites suffered FIRST followed by the private sector depositors who foolishly believed false BALANCE sheets which were POLITICALLY CORRECT but PRACTICALLY incorrect fictions approved by fiduciarily (regulations and regulators allowed ONGOING insolvent operations rather than protect the public by ending and prohibiting them) challenged governments (work for the banks and crony capitalists not for the public at large).

While the head of the ECB and his assorted kitchen sinks scramble to explain how Diesel-BOOM was horribly misunderstood when saying that depositor impairment may and will be the template for future European bank "resolution" (as should have been the case from Day 1), the CEO of Italy's largest bank appears to have missed the memo. As Bloomberg reports, according to the chief executive Federico Ghizzoni, "uninsured deposits could be used in future bank failures provided global rulemakers agree on a common approach." Or failing that, because if Cyprus taught us anything is that Europe will never have a common approach on anything, just use deposits as impairable liabilities, period, once the day of reckoning for Non-Performing Loans comes and these are forced to be remarked to reality, just as happened in Cyprus. One can only hope that uninsured deposits do not represent a substantial portion of the bank's balance sheet because the CEO basically just told them they are next if when risk comes back to the Eurozone with a vengeance. Especially since as Mario Draghi was so helpful in pointing out, "there is no Plan B."

Scott Solano, DPA:Mr Draghi, I've got a couple of question from the viewers at Zero Hedge...

Mario Draghi, ECB: Well you really are asking questions that are so hypothetical that I don't have an answer to them. Well, I may have a partial answer. These questions are formulated by people who vastly underestimate what the Euro means for the Europeans, for the Euro area. They vastly underestimate the amount of political capital that has been invested in the Euro. And so they keep on asking questions like: "If the Euro breaks down, and if a country leaves the Euro, it's not like a sliding door. It's a very important thing. It's a project in the European Union. That's why you have a very hard time asking people like me "what would happened if." No Plan B.

The driftless overnight sessions are back. After the Nikkei soared by 3% following several days of declines, and the Shanghai Composite continued its downward ways despite Non-Manufacturing PMI prints for March which rose both per official and HSBC MarkIt data, Europe was unsure which way to go, especially with the EURUSD once more probing the 1.28 support level. The USDJPY was no help, and even with the BOJ meeting at which new governor Kuroda is finally expected to do something instead of only talking about it, imminent, has hardly seen the Yen budge and provide the expected carry-funding boost to global risk. In terms of newsflow there was little of it: European CPI in March printed at 1.7%, above expectations of 1.6%, but below February's 1.8% rise in inflation. UK continued telegraphing the inevitability of Mark Carney's imminent QE, with construction PMI the latest indicator missing, at 47.2, below expectations of 48.0 (above 46.8 last). Elsewhere, Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy on Wednesday called for Europe to implement growth policies to balance its austerity drive and for countries with room for fiscal manoeuvre to increase public spending. "Europe is the only region in the world in recession. To overcome this situation we need three things: every country needs to do its homework, we need more (European) integration and we need growth policies," Rajoy said in a televised speech to leaders of his People's Party. "That's why countries which can afford it should spend more." Surely Europe will get right on it: after all, it's only "fair."

Remember that under a fractional reserve banking system only a small percentage of deposits is kept on hand for dispersal to depositors. The rest of the money is loaned out. Not only are many of the loans made by these banks going bad, but the reserve requirement in Euro-system countries is only one percent! If just one euro out of every hundred is withdrawn from banks, the bank reserves would be completely exhausted and the whole system would collapse. Is it any wonder, then, that the EU fears a major bank run and has shipped billions of euros to Cyprus? The elites in the EU and IMF failed to learn their lesson from the popular backlash to these tax proposals, and have openly talked about using Cyprus as a template for future bank bailouts. This raises the prospect of raids on bank accounts, pension funds, and any investments the government can get its hands on. In other words, no one's money is safe in any financial institution in Europe. Bank runs are now a certainty in future crises, as the people realize that they do not really own the money in their accounts. How long before bureaucrat and banker try that here?

Debt-serfdom and the dominance of Financial Power are two sides of the same coin. Let's be clear about three things: 1. Too Big to Fail financialization is the metastasizing cancer that has crippled democracy and capitalism; 2. Financialization feeds on expanding debt and cannot survive without it; and 3. Debt is serfdom.Debt is the mechanism of the Financial Powers' dominance and the chains of our serfdom. Eliminate debt and you eliminate the foundation of banks' power and the financial bondage of serfdom. Though it would dearly love to, the State cannot force anyone to take on debt except as taxpayers. We do not have to remain debt-serfs, nor accept our servitude as unavoidable or fated. Debt = serfdom. There is another way to live, frugally, with only short-term debts that are paid off in a few short years. We either accept the consumerist-narcissist debt-serf programming or reject it. We are neither victims nor bystanders. The choice is ours.